When I picked up Reckless, I didn’t really know what to expect. I loved Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart trilogy and now she’s started a new series called Reckless. It plays in the same fantasy world like the Inkheart books but five hundred years later, no longer a medieval but an industrialised world. So I was really excited not only to see what has changed, but also to meet the new characters. I expected a magical, fast paced adventure story. Reckless is exactly that and a lot more.

Jacob Reckless a twenty four year old man from New York is a treasure hunter and his hunting ground is the Mirror world, a world very similar to our own with one exception. In the Mirrorworld, the creatures from all the fairy tales ever written are alive. There are dwarves, witches, fairies, watermen and half-giants. Giants and dragons are believed to be extinct. Then there are the Goyl, human-like creatures with skin made of stone. For hundreds of years the Goyl have lived in their cities beneath the earth. However, now those cities are overcrowded, so the Goyl have risen from their caves to expand their empire over ground starting a war. Apart from the magical creatures that inhabit the Mirrorworld it resembles our world in 1860.

Jacob Reckless found a portal to this world, it’s a mirror. He always regarded the Mirrorworld as his secret and told no one in the other world about it, not even his younger brother Will. One day though, Jacob makes a mistake and his brother follows him through the mirror. When Will gets attacked and wounded, Jacob must use all his treasure hunting skills to find the cure for his brother.

Cornelia Funke has created a refreshingly modern fantasy world, where new innovations like trains and airplanes and the spread of the industrial revolution threaten the old fairy tale creatures. Very many fantasy books have a medieval setting and now Cornelia Funke decided to use a 19th century setting, where dwarves and witches ride trains instead of horses and men shoot guns instead of swinging swords. I felt a bit sceptical at first but Cornelia Funke’s Mirrorworld is so much more interesting than many other recent fantasy world because of it’s modern setting. What I also really like about Cornelia Funke’s new book is that that the Mirrorworld is not only is a magical place but also a scary place with danger lurking around every corner. A place that never really lets you feel safe and at the same time the Mirrorworld is a place of great joy with wonderful places, treasures and characters to be discovered. The Reckless books are also meant for older readers than the Inkheart books.

In every book of her new Reckless series Cornelia Funke treats the fairy tales of different countries, such as the German fairy tales in the first book. Cornelia Funke says her Inkheart books also played in the Mirrorworld, but we’ve only seen a tiny part of the Mirrorworld, namely northern Italy, and now in Reckless Cornelia Funke shows us that there is so much more to discover in the Mirrorworld and it definitely is an adventurous journey worth taking. Welcome behind the mirror!

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